Transcript: 5 Key Skills AEC Marketing Coordinators Need to Advance Their Career

If you’re listening to this podcast, chances are you’re either in marketing or business development for an AEC firm. And, as such, most of your work revolves around proposals. You are most likely coordinating multiple proposals on any given week. I know this because I was you. Since 2005 when I began as a marketing coordinator at an engineering firm – learning how to coordinate a proposal submission was task #1 of my onboarding.

Since then, I have trained dozens of marketing coordinators at three different firms, specifically on how to produce winning proposals. And through this experience, I have realized that there are a few key areas to really master to grow your career in the marketing or pursuit management departments at AEC firms. Those topics or areas of mastery include:

• Understanding how to put together a Win Strategy
• Developing a Proposal Management Plan
• Scheduling the proposal production with all its moving parts and contributors
• Producing Succinct, Graphically Appealing, and persuasive proposal content, and
• Getting Information from Technical Staff

And, you’re in for a real treat because in today’s episode I’m going to give you a brief overview of each and then tell you how you can get to a mastery level for each topic that will give you more career options—even if you don’t want to stay with proposals.

So, are you ready? Let’s get started with the first topic – win strategy.

Win Strategy

One of the most asked questions and challenges I get asked about is creating a win strategy or win plan or capture plan to help with the proposal theme and story.

Many of us wait until the RFP is advertised to start discussing our differentiators and what the clients’ needs are for the project. More often than not, this is way too late to fully develop a win strategy.

To develop a viable win strategy, you must identify what potential projects are coming out and what clients and decision-makers are involved. Your team then needs to research different areas of the project including:

• Why is the project happening?
• How are the decision-makers involved?
• What does each decision maker think about the projects? Issues? Hot buttons? Etc.
• What does the competitive landscape look like? Should you team up with another firm? What does your position look like now? What are your chances of winning?
• What activities or strategies does your firm need to do to improve its chances of winning?

Eventually, all this information will be documented in a Win Plan or sometimes called a capture plan. This Win Plan will guide the pursuit team from the moment your firm identifies the project until the RFP comes out the proposal is finalized. It will also help your team start to develop unique, compelling content to use in your proposal.

And the next to master is when that RFP does come out and that’s putting together a proposal management plan.

Proposal Management Plan

Creating a thorough proposal management plan will save you time when it matters– during writing, reviewing, and production. But first, let’s define what a proposal management plan is. It’s a written document that proposal managers can measure their efforts against – not in someone’s head but written down.

The proposal management planning process involves identifying tasks and individual responsibilities, reviewing the winning strategy, drafting a proposal outline/content plan, creating the schedule and coordinating with subs, and agreeing on the review process needed.

The proposal management plan also includes holding a proposal kick-off meeting with your team. This meeting gives the team to go through all the requirements, ask questions, understand the timeframes and deadlines, and agree on strategies and content.

But, you may be thinking this is a lot of work. Can’t I just start working on the proposal? We are under a deadline. That’s what a lot of new coordinators think, but as they get more experience and submit more proposals, they realize that a proposal management plan turns the proposal chaos, often near the deadline, into a plan. It helps to avoid embarrassing mistakes, wasted time, lost contracts, and frustration.

Just like a general contractor wouldn’t just start constructing a new building with a set of plans from the designer, a proposal pro should begin producing a proposal without a proposal management plan. Well, they could start building, but what are the chances the building would be what the owner wanted?

A key piece of the proposal management plan is the proposal production schedule.

Proposal Production Scheduling

There are typically three general phases of the proposal production process: 1) Planning, 2) Writing, and 3) Reviewing and Delivering. There is an art and science to developing a realistic proposal production schedule that balances time to write and time to review.

There are so many moving parts and people involved in producing a proposal—marketing, project managers, technical staff, subconsultants, etc. You most likely need to get information from each person. Then you need to put all that information together, review, edit, print, and deliver. Documenting all these activities onto a schedule helps you visually see when they are due and when you’re falling behind.

Ideally, your proposal production schedule will include regular proposal check-in meetings to review outstanding items and re-assign tasks, if needed. This keeps you on target and identifies any potential hiccups early on.

I could do an entire podcast episode just on the proposal production schedule! In fact, the entire Module 3 of the proposal pro course goes in-depth in proposal production scheduling including my scheduling formula and sample schedules for 2-week and 1-month turnaround deadlines.

But for time’s sake, I’ll just leave it telling you to break down your proposal production into those three phases – planning, writing, and reviewing/finalization/delivery. When you break it down like that, it helps to ensure that you leave enough room for an adequate review.

Okay, so you’ve put together a proposal management plan and schedule, so now it’s time to put pen to paper and start developing your proposal content.

Content Development – Succinct and Graphically Appealing

This is when you will see the efforts of your Win Plan and Proposal Management Plan pay off. You should be able to use the content gathered from your Win Plan such as issues, hot buttons, strategies, project proofs, etc. to help fill in your proposal sections. That combined with your Proposal Outline (part of your Project Management Plan) will guide your writing and help identify any content gaps.

While drafting your proposal, you want to make sure that the document is as readable as possible. If the reviewers cannot read and understand your message, they can’t score your proposal high. Some strategies I have used in the past to help make proposals more readable include:

• Using fewer words. I do this by writing in active voice and first-person. I also do this by cutting out prepositional phrases whenever it doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence.
• Breaking up large paragraphs into smaller ones.
• Use bulleted lists instead of sentences with long lists.
• Including descriptive subheads. This helps to make the page scannable.
• Adding only meaningful pictures and graphics. Each graphic must have a caption that describes the unique selling point or differentiator. If we don’t have one, we don’t include the graphic.

Again, if you want to dig deeper on this, I would recommend checking out episodes number 2 – Persuasion, Writing, and Design Techniques for Winning Proposals and number 3 – Cut the Fat, Not the Meat – Proposal Editing & Layout advice as well as diving deep into writing lessons and examples in module 4 – Crafting Compelling Content of the Proposal Pro Course.

Ideally, we would like to create every proposal from scratch every time. However, that’s not realistic when you are working on several proposals at once. I believe there are also some elements that can and should be consistent from proposal to proposal such as your quality approach or project management approach. I think it’s perfectly acceptable to start with your firm’s standard process and then just adapt to the specific project or client.

Part of the content will be getting information from other people – including your technical staff or subject matter experts.

Getting Information from Technical Staff

This was probably the most cited challenge. This is a challenge that I have faced and still face today and I am not even managing proposals any longer. I still face this challenge when getting information for blogs, webinars, etc. So I don’t believe the challenge will ever be solved. However, there are ways to help improve this process, work around technical staff, and minimize the effects late content can have on your schedule.

I think first it starts back at the beginning with the Win Strategy. If the technical staff is invested before the RFP comes out, they are more inclined to feel the importance of the proposal effort. Second, when you are developing a good Win Plan document, a lot of the content is already being developed (or at least identified) before the RFP is advertised. This takes a lot of the deadline pressure off both marketing and technical staff.

There are still ways to get information from the technical staff – both conventional and a little unconventional. A quick summary of the methods I have used are:

• Be very specific with what you need and when you need it. I found that if I just ask for a project description, I get no response. Rather, ask a specific question or provide a fill-in-the-blank type format.
• Don’t (just) ask the Project Manager. The Project Manager role is one of the hardest roles in an A/E/C firm. They have client, firm, project team, and marketing needs they must cater to. If the Project Manager is not being responsive, look to others that may have similar knowledge. Often this can be the lead architect, engineer, superintendent, assistant project manager, etc. I tended to ask anyone I could get a hold of.
• Don’t start with a blank page. I would try to find something about the piece of content I was asking for (a scope from the contract, another project approach from a similar project, a list of bulleted questions, etc.) and provide that to the technical person. It’s a lot easier for most people to start with something on the page rather than a blank screen.
• Don’t ask them to write anything. In my experience, my technical team had different strengths when it came to providing information. Some would feel comfortable writing, some were more comfortable around a table in the conference room, and some were just better on the phone. I would chase down one project manager in the breakroom and record as I peppered him with questions (he knew). Then I would use that to write the approach.  Learn about your team’s different ways to provide you with information.

To dive deeper into other strategies to get the information you need from your technical staff or SMEs, check out episode 40 – How to get the proposal information you need, when you need it.

Learn More

These are just a few of the skills to master if you want to grow your career in the AEC Industry. And just to recap those were:

• Understanding how to put together a Win Strategy
• Developing a Proposal Management Plan
• Scheduling the proposal production with all its moving parts and contributors
• Producing Succinct, Graphically Appealing, and persuasive proposal content, and
• Getting Information from Technical Staff

Mastering proposal coordination can be great. You don’t need decades of experience to learn it. Anyone in the A/E/C industry can successfully manage proposals and build the foundation for a rewarding marketing career.

I love this industry, especially marketers who put in countless hours producing proposals so their firms can win projects that shape our environment and skylines. I’ve been teaching proposal coordination methods since I hired my first marketing assistant in 2007. Since then, I started the blog and podcast, Marketers Take Flight, and presented at numerous conferences and workshops to spread the knowledge I have obtained through the industry.

And, I created the Proposal Pro Course – the only online comprehensive proposal management course of its kind. This highly-interactive, deep-drive training is just on proposal coordination methods mentioned above. Registration for the course opens once per year and will be opening soon. To get on the list to be notified when registration opens, visit marketerstakeflight.com/waitlist.

Now it’s your turn, what are some of the skills new proposal coordinators need to master to grow their careers in the AEC industry? Share your thoughts over on the show notes page at marketerstakeflight.com/56. That’s where all of the great discussion happens, so share your thoughts there today. Again that’s marketerstakeflight.com/56.

Okay, this episode was a little longer but thought we needed a good introduction to AEC proposal coordination. So thanks for sticking with me until the end.

Until next week, bye for now.